


CoraxAviary's Reader-Inserts

by CoraxAviary



Category: Band of Brothers, The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Reader-Insert, Self-Insert, aUGHHHHHHH
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:15:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26290069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoraxAviary/pseuds/CoraxAviary
Summary: Here is a collection of my slow-growing number of reader-inserts. Reading things on Tumblr is kinda painful, so I'll be making them available here too :)
Relationships: Eugene Roe/Reader, Eugene Sledge/Reader, Shifty Powers/Reader, Skip Muck/Reader
Kudos: 9





	1. Halcyon [Shifty Powers x Reader]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is the forest, and an indescribable feeling of vitality. It doesn’t take long for you to realize the source of life is your proximity to Shifty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My first actual x reader work. It was actually very fun to write except for my mini-breakdown when I couldn’t figure out how to force my fingers to type the word “kiss.”

“Hey Shifty,” you say, leaning heavily into his side, the light of the full moon making the night bright and luminary. Despite the relative dimness and landscape of shadows, you can still make out the shine of stars reflected in the sheen of Shifty’s eyes. He blinks, and then looks at you. You’re pressing close and for a fearful second you’re afraid he’ll pull back. He doesn’t, just answers.

“Yeah?” he says. The hard angular line of his shoulder is jutting into your arm, but you don’t mind it, just take the moment for how it is and try not to think too hard about any of the days before Zell am See, and maybe the days after, where you will be thrown into the boundless, bloodsoaked scatter-spray of islands that jut barely out of the Pacific ocean, on the other side of the globe. 

Some of the memories have taken on a golden tint – like Toccoa, a happy medium between civilian mundanity and desperation-tinged fraternity. Toccoa is not that hard to think about. You remember when Shifty was smiling and laughing often, untouched by death and hunger in the good times.

“You ever think about how things woulda turned out if this war never happened?”

Shifty pauses for a second to look down at you, and then looks back out over the still lake, glassy surface only bothered occasionally by the meandering wind. The cicadas here are rising and swelling with the black of night. It must be late now, and both of you should head inside to get some sleep before you start training. Training to go to war – back to war, Speirs had phrased it, as if you’d somehow left. 

The heavenly tint of Austria is deceiving, but no one ever forgets why they are here in the grassy knolls of a country that needed liberating, basking in the blue sky and the green lake and the emeraldine forests, where there are deer aplenty, bird in the air, and the deep, deep smell of earthy magic. It is enchanting, but it is not home. It does not possess the same familiarity of a shared language, American pavement, and the feeling of settlement and antique hope. 

You wonder whether or not the American hope is a scam sold by the remnants of your fathers’ generation – a cheap marketing scheme to get as many young people as possible to sign up for a few years of shelling, killing, smoking, bleeding, and running. It’s not really important at this moment, though, so you refuse to ask Shifty something as heartbreaking as the dissolution of the American Dream in the face of world conflict.

“Yeah,” he finally answers. “I reckon’ everybody does.” He says it in that Southern, wild twang that settles in your bones as a souvenir of home, even though you’re not even from anywhere remotely near Virginia, or that small speck of town Shifty speaks so nostalgically about. 

You move around a little bit, trying to make his shoulder less sharp in your side. It’s never been soft, because Shifty is muscled and unyielding like the other men, despite his rather gentle exterior. 

“You think we’d have met?” you ask, and the question is loaded. What you really mean is to dig for any type of affection in Shifty, that old crush coming back with a vengeance now that you haven’t heard German shells in a month. You know he doesn’t really sense the underlying implication, the _I wish we’d met in the calm part of the century_ , at least you don’t think. You tell yourself that the extra pause and the flick of his eyes to your face for a half-second longer is just Shifty being simultaneously thoughtful and languid and earnest like he always is. 

“No, I wouldn’t wager. Not much of a chance,” he says briefly before fidgeting in his lap with some loose part of his uniform, as if some part of the answer bothers him. It bothers you, too, because you can’t have peace and friendship at the same time in any situation. And it’s sad, because you might even choose peace over meeting Easy, just for the chance to never have to do any of this… this rending, firing, and staunching ever.

“Hmm,” you say, because there’s nothing else to say. Shifty laughs emptily and you risk laying your head on his collarbone – something you haven’t done since you huddled in a foxhole together. 

It sounds kind of weird to think, but you can hear him smiling in the dark: just the small sound of lips parting and saliva against teeth. You think it’s sad that you’ll probably never see that smile resurface when you’re done crawling up the sandy beaches under Japanese fire, but you smile too. 

If his hand brushes against your waist, as if he wants to hold you but decides against it, neither of you acknowledge it. 

~

He’s more like a fox to you than anything else, you realize, as you watch him with those sharp eyes and cheekbones and the set of his lips, always looking steady but piercing over the sight of his M-1. He waves at you to be still, and you stop walking, dappled glare of the filtering sun shining bright and bothersome in your eyes. Shifty is on the trail of something you can’t identify, and his look of concentration is almost animalistic as he fixates on the branches and bothered foliage. He looks at home here in the trees and leaves – illuminated with a yellow glow that makes his eyes bronze. 

He nods and signals for you to mirror his line of approach, and you aim wide, the familiarity of flanking somehow overtaking the foreignness of hunting a deer. Suddenly, the both of you break into a clearing and there is a large doe standing in the center, eyes wide and ears pricked. It hears something – you don’t want to admit it, but maybe it’s your quiet gasp – and it bolts through the trees, leaving no trace. 

Shifty’s eyes silently fade back from that wild look – the passion of hunting, you suppose – and he looks back at you. It’s a little disappointing to see him so earthly after getting used to hunter-Shifty for a while, the one that makes you think he might have some blood of Artemis in him or something, but you tell yourself that you are running away with strange metaphors. 

“Sorry,” you try, knowing Shifty will try to blame it on himself.

“No, no,” he says, waving a hand, clearly disappointed but trying not to show it. “It’s alright.”

“I probably scared it,” you say. 

Shifty doesn’t debate, but he looks down at his gun and back into the wilds, debating pursuit. He shakes his head. “Don’t be feelin’ bad,” he says. “I don’t really know if I’d feel right killin’ it anyway. What with all the food we got now.”

You both pause to process that statement. There is plentiful food in the kitchens, courtesy of the town, the farms, and the unhindered supply lines. It’s true, and you nod. 

“We headin’ back?” you ask, and Shifty looks out, almost longingly, back into the greenery. You pause. “We don’t have to. I’m sure no one’s gonna miss us,” you amend, brushing your hair out of the way. You didn’t remember to tie it this time, and it spills out in neglected strands that you are constantly blowing out of your face. Shifty turns his head out of the corner of your eye.

“You think we can stay out for another hour?” he says, looking down at the ground.

“Yeah, sure,” you say, slinging your rifle back onto your shoulder. “Where d’ya wanna go?”

“Dunno yet,” he says, strangely avoiding your glance. Maybe he wants to ask you something and he doesn’t feel very comfortable about it, but you pretend all is well. Is he uncomfortable with you particularly? The possibility is dismaying, and you think that maybe you were staring for too long. “We can walk around,” he finally says, nodding at some invisible path he’s managed to pick out in the undergrowth. 

You follow, watching Shifty meander with grace through the leaves. You are not so deft with plants, and are left ducking and wading and crashing through matter despite the gap Shifty is making, just a foot or so ahead. He pushes a stalk aside and unknowingly lets it go, and it whips back to lash your face. 

“Ow,” you yelp, rubbing at the bridge of your nose. You’re not irritated, just surprised.

“What happened?” says Shifty almost immediately, turning around and moving a step closer. “You alright?”

“Yeah, yeah,” you say, watching him come closer through your fingers.

Shifty reaches out and takes ahold of your wrists, pulling them away from your face, and he looks intently at the place where you are rubbing. “Oh, was that me?” he says, leaning in, and you realize just how close the two of you are, his fingers around your arms and almost touching your uniform where you hold your hands up to your chest. 

Shifty is not really naive, but you are convinced that he is absolutely childlike in certain moments of concentration, like now. You can hear his breathing quite clearly over the shifting of foliage, and his eyes slowly lift to yours, only realizing now how you have started to hold your breath. You feel your cheeks start to heat, and you watch Shifty look a little harder at you with gradual realization. 

There is silence between you, and only your eyes watching each other. Your heart is pounding in your throat as you try desperately to divine Shifty’s thoughts through his wide, keen eyes. 

“It’s gonna leave a little bit of a mark,” he murmurs quietly, almost whispering, because it doesn’t take much volume for the words to go between you two, with the inches of separation. And very cautiously, like you’ll crack under him, he removes one of his hands from your wrists and reaches over the space, to brush very gently at your nose. 

You aren’t holding your breath now, but you feel as if you are breathing very loudly, because it’s all you can hear with the pounding of your heart in your head. His eyes flick downwards slightly, over your face, and you don’t want to dare to hope anything. But in a move that seems daring for Shifty – because he’s never sudden with you, at least not on purpose – he surges forward and presses his lips to yours. 

It’s sudden and it’s brief, but you break apart with wide eyes and panting breaths. You extricate your arms from his grasp, and reach up and over his shoulders to slide your hands into his hair, pressing your forehead to his and breathing in the scent of the forest – of life, of leaves, and of sun. His hands go to your waist; he smiles first, and it’s bright and magnetic, somehow even more warm than the filtering sunlight. 

You smile without care, just for the moment, and you stay in the moment for as long as you can, just enjoying. You think, for a moment, that in this small slice of time, it is possible to choose both love and peace, even if that peace is fleeting. 

And then you lean in for another kiss, surrounded by the living fairytale forest of Austria, and encompassed, all around, with the vitality of nature that is wild and free. 


	2. Asclepius [Reader insert / Doc Roe]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is winter in Bastogne and you wish for a different time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is an experimental delve into x reader that became angsty and dark. It ended up with a lot of sad, not much x reader. I’m still not sure if I can write good x reader because this experiment went off the rails. It was fun to write, though.
> 
> Anyway, this is a reader insert + Roe vignette in Bastogne.
> 
> [Originally posted on Tumblr 9/2/2020]

In the cold, cold frozen blue-gray of French winter, the scent of blood, acrid and metallic, mixes with the drafty air of the chapel. The groans of the wounded float upwards to the heavens like a choir of battered angels. You imagine the wisps of life floating unbound from the near-dead, rising from airways like holy bits of ghost past the glass panes and through the vaulted ceilings.

Someone new is brought in screaming, and you can almost see the golden smoke of vitality leaking from his mouth with every new breath of terror. He is not exceptional. The church is filled over capacity, and you are left using cotton sheets stripped from beds. 

In this church, you have learned the American words for “mother” quickly. When they leak from almost every soldier’s mouth on his way to the euphoria of death, they take a permanent place in the back of your mind. Among your universe of French, a small expanding world of English grows, against your will, pressing insistently against the inside of your head. Echoes of _no_ and _please_ and all the other desperate mindless pleas of the dying men grasping at their last moments of lucidity collect, like tips in a jar.

Not all men die in groaning, crying messes. Some of them just go quiet, the trickling blood streaming from small bullet-shaped shreds louder than their actual sobs. These are a little better, because you know they don’t go through their last moments in pain, even though they’re already floating away into some heaven or hell that awaits the slain of the Second World War. Some of the men actually survive, and you count yourself blessed for only a moment after you finish tying a bandage or fixing a splint, only to leave them a few moments later, leaving the rest of their lives in the copper-stained hands of fate. 

You look up at the crucifix in the front of the church. Or the hands of God, you suppose, the gold of the crosses gleaming duly in vivid contrast to the floor, which is shining brighter with blood than even the yellow metal things that hang coldly at the front, like a reminder of the color of heaven in Revelation, which for this moment – this week, this month, this year – seems farther away than ever. 

_Mama_ , this one moans brokenly, crying in fear, through bubbling blood that becomes a sputtering fountain, pluming up wrongly through his airway and sheeting down his face, into his eyes, getting into his hair. At this point, you turn away, let someone else do the honors of sweeping blood off his face, telling him he’ll be alright, muttering worthless words in a language they don’t know. You’ve lost the conviction behind the sayings a long time ago, and you let someone else who has been here for a few months less do the honors.

There is movement at the front of the _cathédrale_ again, and you look up to receive the next one. This one has nothing where there should be a hand, a forearm, and a bicep, and there are splinters of wood – more like planks – jutting out from his torso like a half-circle of a saint’s nimbus. Except these soldiers are no saints, and he is shaking with pain, uncontrolled cries coming from his mouth every few seconds when he’s moved. 

It’s _him_ , you recognize, with the one that he just brought in. The medic, who comes into town routinely with more wounded men all the time – if the bombed-out, shelled-out fragments of rubble can even be called a _town_. You recognize the dark hair, the steely eyes, the dutiful set of his shoulders. There is blood always on him, around him, and he is a study in lights and darks; he goes about his medic’s mission with a calm hand and soft words. You would conclude in a different time that he belonged here, in the chapel, like the messenger Hermes, delivering news of life and death, leaving red fingerprints on the paper and guiding souls like a psychopomp into the gray beyond. 

But today, you see him as less of a numen and more of a man, because his lips are set in a grim line as he clutches the makeshift tourniquet in desperation, gritting his teeth and holding the man down at the same time. You rush over and fall into the choreography of staunching blood, twisting fabrics, ripping uniforms. Your arms pass over and under Roe’s as you dance over the dying man, and you think fleetingly that it is unfair that the only time you ever move so gracefully is when yet another soul is leaching away. 

The man is starting to fade. Roe slaps at the side of the soldier’s face once, twice, says something to get him to stay awake. The man clutches weakly at your dress, and you let him, because it’s not important that he’s coloring your dress a little darker red when he could be saved. His eyes start to drift closed anyway, and Roe is louder and more insistent, eyes going wide and mouth opening wider in a discordant yell, saying something like _no, stay awake,_ and lying that _it’s okay, you’re gonna live_ until he dies finally, and you stop winding the sheets around the splinters jutting unnaturally from his side. His hands fall from your shoulders limply, slowly.

You both stare at his blue eyes, looking so alive. Blood is still making its way out of his body. It is almost as if he could draw breath any second, and you consider giving his chest some pumps to really make sure, because Roe looks heartbroken – like he frequently does in that jacket, stained with the patchwork marks of God-knows how many have passed on in his care, screaming and clutching and begging. Roe looks at the splinters in the man’s side like they are Germans themselves, and his face hardens almost imperceptibly before he reaches out, and with incongruent care to his demeanor of passing rage, he gently slides the eyelids closed before drifting back into the tired, hard-eyed state of shivering misery that is all too familiar in this bone-chilling winter. 

He stays and lingers for a few minutes, helping with other men who are, in the eyes of triage, manageable. And then he disappears, and you follow, not knowing why, because outside in the snow there are the winds of chill that hold like a vice around your bones. But outside there are less dead bodies – at least where you can see them – and so you reason that this is maybe an escape. You bring some supplies for him, but you think more about Roe than the things you are giving him.

“Hey, medic.” It comes out more like _médical_ , but it sounds similar anyways.

Roe looks up, startled for a second before relaxing in the slightest at the sight of you. It is a small comfort that he reacts like this, with a bit less tension, and you don’t know why, but you stand in front of him with arms full of bedsheets. 

He gives a noncommittal grunt and then looks at the bedsheets. 

“ _Bedsheets?”_ he asks, and you nod. At least you can understand this, and you sit down beside him with the box. 

“All we have,” you say, hoping he understands. 

He looks like he tries to smile at that, and there’s a slight relaxation in the tension of his mouth before he looks up at you and takes the box. “ _Merci_ ,” he says in response, and there’s a certain familiarity in the term, like he knows enough French to get by. 

“ _You, ah…”_ you trail off, grasping at English words, moving your tacky, rust-colored hands in the frigid air. The damned language. So indelicate. “ _Speak. Well.”_

Roe’s lips curve upwards at this, and you feel a sort of satisfaction that you made this burdened Army medic smile. “I know some,” he says in a strange form of French, but with ease. 

“You speak?” you say in slight surprise, because not much can evoke a substantial reaction from you anymore after being a witness to the violent delineation between life and death, listener to the countless forms of _mother_ that these Americans use in diversity. You think you can count more than four, but this is not the time to think about that. You force yourself back to the present. 

“Yeah, I do. Cajun French.”

“Hmm,” you murmur, wondering what else there is to be said, because suddenly you don’t want Roe to leave. He exudes a force of life, and you want it, thirsting after vitality amidst the cloud of death. Suddenly you don’t want to go inside the cathedral ever again, even though you know you’ll be back inside without doubt, breathing the mist of souls when someone else is brought in with their feet blown off into particles of meat.

“Don’t got anything else?” Roe asks. He holds up the box with stiff, cold arms. 

“No, I am sorry,” you say. You are sorry about a lot of other things, a litany of them, in fact, like the man who died with the halo of tree wood tangling in his intestines, but you stay quiet, watching flakes of snow drift down from the heavens. Awakening memories that are just starting to be buried under a fresh snow isn’t courteous.

“Oh,” says Roe with the tone of a man who is accustomed to disappointment. “A’right.” It’s not alright, and you both know it, but you stare at his red hands and his dark eyes with something you know is unmistakable attraction, but something you know is grossly inappropriate in this time of bloodshed and chaos. 

You wonder if it would be different if you had lived in America, or if Roe had met you in summertime Bastogne when the trees are green and solid and not bursting with hellish unpredictability, and when the ground isn’t frozen, but covered with grass and small white flowers. When the cathedral doesn’t look so foreboding and it is once again an expression of divinity on Earth. 

But it is a dream – a universe that does not exist. You met Roe during the War to End all Wars, in a small fragmented city in the dead of winter, both of you frozen to the bone, drenched in American blood, and shivering in shared misery. You are together only as long as the forces of fate permit, until one of you is killed by bullet or shell or cold, or maybe until Roe moves away with the campaign. 

When he moves away, untouched by artillery – and this is one thing you are optimistic about and hope to God you won’t regret – _when_ he goes away, he will continue to save them from death: snatch them right from the arms of the black looming terror that seems to define the pale days of Bastogne. 

Maybe you’ll move away from this place that you can barely stomach as it is, when it’s all over, and find out that Roe is safe in America or with an occupying force in England or Germany or maybe even France. If the war goes your way. 

Roe gets up to leave, and you must push all of the wanting down deep and smile, hoping he’ll come back in one piece to this small, wrecked, frozen place to see you before the 101st leaves.

“I’ll see you soon?”

Roe sighs out a breath, and for a second you think of the unsaid implication that his return means another man in trouble, gurgling and charred, but the ghost of a smile touches his face. “I’ll see ya soon.”

You nod. “Good,” you say, briefly and with the least bleakness you can manage. 

Roe nods. “Good.” And he turns around and leaves. You know he’ll catch a ride back into the forest, and you don’t want to watch him go, so you turn to go back into the church. 

Out of the corner of your eye, he hesitates, and you think he will possibly come back and say something – anything at all that would make this better. He doesn’t, though, and you move on through the cathedral doors, thoughts of a greener France dying in your head as your mind goes directly to triage, assessing the new arrivals at the door. 

You hear a car rumbling past, and know that Roe is on that one, going to save some more men from a death alone in the snow. 

Some men will slip through his grasp, but he will save more than you can. It’s something about his spirit – the presence. The comfort. You can feel it and you know the men can feel it, too. 

No, he’s not Hermes, you decide, looking back up at the vaulting arches of the ceiling high above – the paintings of celestial skies somehow untouched by the mire of red and stink of copper. Hermes is the one who guides the already-dead. He’s Asclepius, the one who brings them back from the brink. 

You allow yourself to smile for a moment, and then you get back to work in the cathedral until you cannot continue anymore.

.


	3. Momentary Warmth [Skip Muck x Reader]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deep in the snowed-in forests of Bois Jacques, you are trapped in the network of trees and ice. Refuge is found in the form of foxholes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Originally posted on Tumblr 9/16/2020]

It’s gray and blue in the blurry sky and cold as a tundra, and another icy blast whiffs off the top of your foxhole – almost over your head but not quite, catching you in the face. You bury yourself in your single scarf, but it isn’t enough and you just let the icy crystals wash over your face like tiny beads of fire. There isn’t energy left to spare to worry about these things. You let them come and the days blend together – just a chain of days, punctuated only slightly by gunshots and blood and raining hellfire.

If the snow is fire, Easy Company has been incinerated thoroughly every day. It piles everywhere, drifting as you sleep; anyone who uses a tarp – or who can get their hands on one – is buried by daybreak. 

Maybe it’s not a break of dawn, you think sleepily, as you sit in a half-frozen state of hibernation, drifting between consciousness and the black dreamworld behind your eyelids. Dawn barely breaks anymore – it’s just a white-hot sputter through the towering fog, the blasted hell of a fog that prevents any air support or artillery cover. 

The sun leaks in a uniquely watery way through the particles in the air – it’s refracted a little in the snow, and you’d almost call it beautiful if you weren’t shivering at the bottom of a frozen dirt ditch, hesitant to stomp your feet for fear that they will break at the joints and shatter inside your boots. 

You know better. You’ve been one of the lucky few to avoid trench foot or frostbite, for whatever reason God knows, and your feet are fine. It just feels like your blood has congealed into a solid mass inside your body, and you can almost visualize a feathery red and blue network of ice meandering through your veins and arteries. One move, and it’ll all shatter. 

You take in a large lungful of sharp-edged air and let it out, barely avoiding driving yourself into a coughing fit because of the sting that makes its way deep inside your lungs. There is white steam that plumes out of your mouth and nose, and you think that today you woke up fine – lucky not to have turned into a block of ice overnight. Just another day. Miserable to be alive. 

At least you are alive, and it’s what counts when there are a lot of people – good people – who no longer have the privilege to feel cold, feel anything, because they are not alive anymore.

Skip is still asleep beside you, curled up below the blanket, legs folded against the shallow edge of the hastily-dug foxhole. He’s warm against your side, but not warm enough to stave off the reaching freeze of Bois Jacques. You shiver and pull the blanket slightly, knowing that it is futile but still fiddling with the edge anyway. It’s small motions like this that used to remind you of home, when the concept of warmth was immediate and accessible; when blankets weren’t luxuries and maybe a little thicker, not olive green and frozen stiff. 

He’s breathing quietly, small huffs of breath coming out in vapor with each exhale. The blankets are bunched up below his chin, and his nose is redder than before. You smile momentarily, because he looks like he’s at peace, at least in dreams.

Someone ambles by sluggishly in the filtering light. You let go of whatever sleep you were hoping to catch the tail end of – there’s no falling back asleep in this white brightness of day – and decide to get out of the hole, laboriously and slowly. You don’t want to wake Skip, but you have to take a piss anyway, so you bite the bullet, grit your teeth, and try to crawl out of the hole without letting a pile of snow underneath the wool. 

You claw your way up the slope, and you watch a clod of frozen powder break off the lip of the hole and slide down into the pit. You scrabble faster, muttering a _shittin’ hell_ , and haul yourself out of the pit. 

Skip mutters something and shifts. It might be a _where ya goin’_ or something. You take a guilty look, conclude that he still has a small chance at regaining unconsciousness if you don’t respond, and trudge off in the creaking, crunching powder to find a suitably private place.

“Hey, hey,” says a voice, none too patient, and accompanying heavy boot treads make their way through the snow towards you. You’re still redoing the buttons on your uniform with shaking fingers, and it’s your third try with the top one. You turn your head, and Guarnere is materializing out of the white mist. 

“Y’always walk in on a girl when she’s pissin’?” you ask sharply, finally snapping the closure closed. Guarnere seems to belatedly notice where exactly your hands are and what you are doing with your pants.

“Shit, sorry,” he says, and he spins around quickly, but you’re already done. You walk past him in the direction of the back of the camp, ready to try and bargain for some K-rations that are possibly less shitty than the ones in your pocket, heaving your rifle back up onto your shoulder. 

“Hey,” Guarnere tries again. You look back, helmet strap striking your cheek as you turn, and you barely wince, just blink a few times and wait for Guarnere to catch up with that funny affected walk. It looks kind of uncomfortable, maybe painful even, and you tell yourself once more that he did this to himself. “Ya see Doc today?”

“No,” you say, almost addressing him with his nickname to lighten the mood, but then considering that indeed it would be a bit on-the-nose. You clear your throat scratchily. “Bill.”

“Pissin’ is hell,” he says. 

You nod. “Sure is, Sarge.”

He looks at you with a screwed-up face. “Go to hell.”

“You too, Sergeant,” you say, flashing a brief sardonic smile, and you both break into the clearing where medics are offloading something from one of the trucks you see ever so often. The red of their patches and the crosses emblazoned so brightly on some of the crates is a stark contrast to the pale, stalky forest. You both stop for a minute to watch the life as it congregates around the truck, and then it’s over and the truck roars away and you’re left staring at a few boxes, two milling medics, and the blue-washed impressions in the snow where medics stepped around the supplies, leaving trails of footprints in the fresh powder layer. 

You stomp at the ground, trying for the tenth time to work some more liquid blood into your toes. Maybe there’s about half a foot more snow here than yesterday night when you drifted off, but you’re not sure because it all blends together. 

No one’s measuring the snowfall. There’s no radio to announce it to, no folks in a warm house to listen to the announcer. There’s just shallow foxholes, flying splinters, deafening blasts, and long held breaths of quiet. It wouldn’t make sense to announce the snow levels to Easy, anyway. You sleep in the snow. You’d just have to measure how much is piled on top of a tarp when it caves in on you in the middle of the nebulous night.

A clump of snow slides off the branches of a tree, and falls to the ground with a muffled thump. You jump slightly at the sound, and eye the tree. It’s laden with a load of icy snow, and you wonder how it even held that much anyway, and Guarnere is equally as quiet, watching another clump make its way slowly down a branch. 

You defocus and catch a glimpse of pale white skin and an echo of a deep voice. It’s Roe, you know already, because you’ve memorized his bunny-hop gait and chicken-wing silhouette, hands shoved in his jacket pockets. 

“It’s Roe,” you say, pointing.

“Damn, good eyes,” Guarnere says, following your finger with his line of sight. 

“It’s the chicken wings,” you say. 

“Chicken– ?” he starts, but Roe is going to walk in the other direction. “Hey, hey Doc,” Guarnere calls, hobbling after Roe. You think that maybe it’s just the way he walks in the cold, and convince yourself that he’s not in that much pain, because it makes you feel better about leaving Guarnere to rant to Roe by himself. 

+

“Hey, got you something,” Skip calls when he sees you weave through the gray-trunked trees that border the Easy territory of Bois Jacques, if you can even call it a territory if Krauts can walk in and out without realizing. 

Skip brandishes a wrapped package, stepping past Penkala and Buck. The men are gathered around a vat of beans. It’s steaming hot, and you go directly for the food, but whatever Skip has stops you in your tracks.

“Chocolate?” you say with growing disbelief. “Thought we didn’t have no more.”

“Got it from a Dog guy,” says Skip, and you stop in front of him, pulling one hand out of your pocket to make a grab at the chocolate. “Nuh-uh,” says Skip, pulling it away and holding it behind him. You don’t really want to exert any more energy when movement leeches heat to the cold air anyway, so you stop and just hold your hand out, palm up, in expectation. 

He looks at you and cracks that smile – a lotta lip, not much tooth – and you have to smile too. 

“Gotta give me something for it,” he says. 

“Like what?” you say, already fishing in your pocket for a spare few cigarettes. You only have a precious three, but you pinch one between your fingers inside the flap. You look up at him again, and he cocks an eyebrow. You roll your eyes. _Fine_. Two, just for Skip. You bring them out and reach for his uniform, flipping open his chest pocket flap and dropping them in before he can see that you gave him more than one. He’d probably whine at you to take one back, even though you know he wants it. You will deal with that later.

You pat the pocket with an air of finality. “Gimme the chocolate,” you say, wiggling your fingers, and he drops the full bar – a _full bar_ – into your hands. You bring it to your nose, sniffing deeply, and you close your eyes in momentary bliss. 

“Is that chocolate?” says someone from nearby, and you open your eyes again tiredly. Liebgott is standing a few paces away, and he’s closing in quickly. “Whoah, Hershey,” squeaks Liebgott in reverential awe. You shove it into a pocket, shushing him. Liebgott is already opening his mouth to ask, and you shake your head no preemptively. 

“Aw, c’mon,” he intones. 

You exchange a look with Skip. Skip is shaking his head, but you give in. “Come see me tonight,” you say. Liebgott’s eyes take on a brighter shine. “But,” you say, waving a finger. “No friends.”

“No friends,” he repeats rote, apparently still shocked at his fortune and your show of goodwill, and he goes back to whatever he was doing with Perconte. Behind you, you can hear Skip slapping his own forehead, and the whack almost echoes. 

“Careful, Skip,” yells Penkala from three trees away. “Don’t wanna alert the Jerries.”

There is laughter, and you can pretend things are right with the world when everyone is smiling, if only for a few seconds. Skip’s forehead is getting redder than usual, and you reach up to rub at it. 

“Stop, mom,” says Skip, pushing your hand away, but he’s still got that quirk to the corner of his mouth. 

“Don’t call me mom,” you say, partially out of habit, and partially with a feeling of awkwardness. Skip never really calls you _mom_ , and you wonder why he took it up, too. “Lipton is mom, and there can’t be two moms.”

“Okay, he’s mom and you’re dad,” says Malarkey, snorting. He presses his canteen into Penkala’s hands to double over and laugh without spilling. You frown, watching him crumple at his own joke.

“Nah, I’m just your aunt with ten cats,” you say. “Real dad is Buck.”

Buck sputters and there’s another round of laughs. You feel a half bit lighter, bringing levity to the company, even though Buck goes back to being empty-eyed a little too fast, Roe is missing, and Winters and Nixon are down somewhere else at HQ. 

And you get in line for the last of the beans.

+

Later, huddled in your hole, you wonder why you so disliked Skip calling you mom. It wasn’t that it was offensive – it bothered you because Skip never was one for the names, but particularly with you. _Why would he start now?_ you wonder.

“Got any extra syrettes?” asks Roe’s voice, coming towards your foxhole. It’s the second time he’s been around today, and you turn around stiffly as best you can, craning your neck out the top of the hole.

“Nah, y’already asked, Doc.”

Roe sniffs and sighs, and you know there’s a special kind of pain reserved for this man in particular. You feel bad for turning him away. He shakes his head in annoyance, and almost leaves before turning back around. 

“Know where Heffron is?”

“Babe?” you say. “I haven’t got a goddamn clue.”

“Alright, thanks,” Roe mutters mildly, and he disappears into the clinging mist, trudging miserably with snow landing on the top of his helmet and dusting his shoulders. 

“Who was that?” says a voice, and then Skip slides into the foxhole, none too gracefully, landing on top of your legs and partially in your lap. You shove him off, and he goes sprawling into the other half of the foxhole, trapped in the gap between you and the wall. “Okay, okay, I’m movin’,” he says, and somehow he manages to right himself and shove his ass into the gap.

He sighs out a breath, and it goes up in steam. 

“Know where Babe is?” you ask absently, mostly just to break the silence in the air. 

“The replacement? Red hair?” asked Skip. “No.”

“Thought so,” you say in response, burrowing farther under the blanket. You watch the snow falling to the ground – little specks of crystal drifting in and out of the waning light, piling in drifts and falling into your newly carved foxhole, right on top of Skip’s shoulders. He’s shaking from the cold, and you’re somehow not, so you lean in closer in an attempt to share body heat. 

It’s futile, because the scathingly icy wind steals body heat with frightening efficiency. But you lean in anyway, and Skip scoots farther into the hole. 

Your thoughts go back to the mom thing.

“Hey, Skip,” you say. 

“Hmm?” He’s digging around in his pocket for a light, and he’s holding one of your newly bestowed cigarettes in his lips. There’s no comment about the other cigarette, so he either gave the extra to someone else or is deciding not to make a fuss. You get out your lighter and flick the wheel a couple of times, finally getting a flame and holding it to the cigarette. He breathes in and then exhales a cloud of smoke; you shake the top back over the lighter and put it away. He sighs.

“You really think of me as a mom?”

Skip raises his eyebrows, taking another pull at the cigarette. “I mean…” He looks at you – not a small glance. He _really_ looks at you, eyes moving over your face as he lets smoke out of his nose. “Depends.”

“On what?” you say, shifting around to get out the chocolate, moving stiffly and elbowing Skip in the side. He takes it silently and just presses himself into the side of the dirt wall to give you more space, and you grab ahold of the chocolate, bring it out, and hold it to your nose. It’s a large D-ration bar, and there’s nothing like it in the entire company. If there was, all the other men would have sniffed it out and eaten it already. 

You move to break up the top row of squares, and they crack with a soft, satisfying feel, the plastic outer packaging crinkling loudly. You turn your head the short distance it takes to look Skip in the eye, and he’s about to say something, but there’s a rustle in the snow. You drop the chocolate in your lap and fumble for your M-1, and Skip tenses up, raising his rifle. 

As if summoned, Liebgott skids around to the top of your foxhole, and both of you sigh and lower your rifles. 

“Whoah, take it easy,” says Liebgott, raising both hands. “Just here for the Hershey’s.”

“It’s D-ration, not Hershey’s,” you say, ramming the gun into its previous spot beside you in the hole, wondering how it fit within the gently curving dirt walls in the first place. “Besides, Hershey’s aint the best.”

Liebgott snorts, but his eyes are on the bar. You give him one of the precious squares, and instead of eating it, he puts it carefully into his pocket. 

“You’re gonna melt it into your ODs,” you say incredulously. 

Liebgott delivers one of those scrappy winks, patting at the flap. “Not in this cold.”

Skip makes a face. He looks slightly upset, but he’s trying not to show it. “Don’t waste it,” he says quietly, and Liebgott scampers away into the dark. You sigh, and Skip does too, looking at the chocolate. With one square gone, the bar is substantially depleted. 

“Bastogne made a saver outta Joe, even,” says Skip. “He never used to save stuff.”

“I’d just eat it,” you say. “Never know when you’re not gonna be around to enjoy things anymore. All that shelling.”

Skip gives you a concerned look, but you wonder why, considering that mortality is now casual within the company. Perhaps it’s the fatalistic tone, so you shrug it off.

You really want to know about the mom thing, but it would be too obvious if you brought it up again. Skip seems to have forgotten about it, so you take a square of chocolate, hold it between your teeth, and put the rest away. When you can dedicate your complete and utter focus to the chocolate, only then do you put it in your mouth, and you lean back with your eyes closed, savoring the uncommon sweetness. 

When you open your eyes again, Skip is staring at you, and you rub at your mouth self-consciously. “I got something on my face?” you ask, and Skip is jerked out of whatever he was thinking, and he sits back, smoking the cigarette. “Ya want a square?” you offer, already moving to dig the chocolate out again. 

“No, no,” says Skip, shaking his head. “Don’t mind me.”

“Why you gotta stare like that, then?” you say playfully, knocking into his shoulder with yours. “It’s not, uh... “ you search for the right word, a word you haven’t used for a long, long time. “Gentlemanly.”

Skip can do nothing but snort. “Gentlemanly.”

“Yeah.” You smile for a second.

“Nothing ‘bout this place is proper,” he says around the cigarette. He’s mastered the balance of holding it between his lips and also talking at the same time. “If I wanted to be a gentleman I’d ask you to dinner, proper like.”

You’re laughing before, but at his statement, you stop and search his face. “Really?”

“Really what?” He’s still smiling, and he dumps the remainder of the cigarette outside the foxhole on his side, brushing a handful of show on top and shaking the rest of the cold powder off his hand. 

“You’d take me on a date?”

Skip stops and blinks, blowing the last bit of smoke out his mouth. He turns away, and then looks at the sky before looking down at the blankets and your boots against the other side of the hole. “Damn, I really said that out loud, huh.”

“Yeah, Sarge,” you say, slightly awkwardly. “Ya did.”

“Sorry,” says Skip, bringing a hand above the blanket to rub at his face, not meeting your eyes. ‘Didn’t mean to make it… like that.”

“Like what?” you dig. You won’t let this go this time – there were too many times like this where you think you can see a small glimmer of something, but then it disappears and Skip runs away to hide with the mortar crew, or something. There’s no running now, when you’re both assigned to this foxhole, and he’s quite literally glued to your side. 

“Unprofessional.”

It’s your turn to snort this time, snaking an arm between your bodies to jab a finger in his side. He emits a small sound and knocks into your arm with his shoulder. 

“When have we ever been professional?” you say with a small sliver of hope. 

“Right,” says Skip, unconvinced. 

There’s a pause of silence, and the only sound is breathing and the strange ambiance of snow. It makes a small sound, subtle, but you can’t really describe it. You decide that you don’t really like to listen to it anyway.

“I’d go on a date with you,” you say in a rush. 

There’s silence and you don’t look into his eyes, and instead you look, unfocused into the trees, cursing yourself silently for saying something so sudden. You hope your friendship with Skip hasn’t dissolved completely – would he think you were being too forward? Too much? The doubts came back in a rush, and all you can do is breathe one stinging breath at a time, watching the disappearing points of the tops of the thin, barren trees brush the plane of the blackening sky. You can’t look to your left, where Skip is, crammed close, arm to arm and leg to leg. You consider breaking the awkwardness by just getting out of the foxhole and taking a walk in the lightless air of suspended ice. You make an aborted move to begin to claw your way out of the hole, and Skip’s hand goes across your waist, holding you back from reaching for the edge. 

You look at him, and he smiles – he smiles and all the insecurity washes away, replaced with wonder. You sink back into the foxhole. 

“Stop frownin’ like that,” said Skip. 

“ ‘M bein’ unprofessional,” you say briefly with only the beginnings of an unsteady smile. Skip rolls his eyes. His arm travels up to your collar, and he pulls you in by the jacket. 

You take a measured breath of air, the slightest bit warmer – heated by Skip’s proximity – and lean in. 

Your helmets crack against each other. You both wince and sit back, and you laugh a few huffs of relief, releasing more clouds of water vapor against the shadow of the night. 

“You should take off your helmet,” says Skip with the smile – the one you love. It takes you a few more moments to get it off, partially because your fingers are half-frozen, but also because you pause to consider just how much you think about his smile. 

It’s distracting, and by the time you drop your helmet in your lap, he’s already kissing you with cold lips but it’s alright because it’s Skip.

It’s a little warmer that night, though not by much. Once again, the Germans decide not to shell you to pieces. 

And for that time, you are happy to be alive, in this particular foxhole, with an excuse to have Skip pressed against you with no room to spare. You are alive, and Skip is alive, and you are grateful to be here to experience these things, at least in the small moment of relative comfort.

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to ruin the tone, but I just have to say that I researched STDs for half an hour to try to figure out what Guarnere had (assuming it was an STD). The things I do for fics, geez


	4. Never Done

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a bomb and then they say there is peace. You do not feel it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Period-typical ethnic slurs. Depictions of major character death (kinda).
> 
> [Originally posted on Tumblr 10/25/2020]

He repeats it, but you don’t react as he expects you to. All the other men positively erupt, but you can’t do anything except clench your teeth, rock back and forth, and try to quell the stinging of the tears that are springing up unbidden in your eyes.

You feel a tear slide down your cheek, and you swipe it away roughly. They are tears of shock – the type that spring forth when artillery is so bright the night flashes a phosphorus white and your retinas feel positively sandblasted.

It can’t be done. It can’t be over. Of course it isn’t over – these Japs are gonna fight until the very last man. The very last woman. The last child, in the street, you suppose, if it comes down to it. Victory means the eradication of every single one of those goddamn Orientals, and you intend to finish the job. 

Instead of dropping your rifle, your grip tightens around the barrel, and you are momentarily steadied by the solid metal and wood of the thing – this weapon, this machine, that has followed you throughout your entire godforsaken three-year stint in the mud and mosquitoes. Wading through the corpses and the bloody waters – thickened with suffocating rot and guts spilling out and shells scattering deadly and bright overhead with a noise that could deafen. 

It’s not over; of course it’s not. As long as there are still people on that island, the war is not over. 

You grip the rifle tight, and you can’t say anything, except you absently hear this kind of keening animal-ish noise, until there’s a hand on your back and a voice telling you to calm down. The hand moves in slow circle and the unpleasant sound stops, and you close your own mouth, and there are sobs ripping from your chest and you are shaking your head _no_ in disbelief. 

You are shaking so badly that you can see the tremors in your own hands even though they’re tight around the gun. 

“Easy,” says a gentle voice. 

You do not give in to whatever is _easy_ , but you do recognize that someone is trying to calm you down. It’s a bit like stroking a dog, whenever someone from the company tried it before, and then after Peleliu it eventually evolved into a “shut up” and ultimately hands closing around your throat if a dream turns out too loud. 

This one is not a stranglehold. It comes to rest very lightly on your shoulder. You are crying in earnest now, and the surrounding universe fades away until all you can feel is the disbelief. And then the injustice. The countless bodies littering the shore after every beachhead invasion; the bodies forgotten facedown in the endless jungles; the mutilated, tortured corpses left behind by the Japanese; the ones who are missing a leg or an arm or a couple of fingers; the ones with no more sanity left to spend in the civilian world. The ones with soul torn out of their bodies too soon, bullets puncturing flesh and releasing sprays of lifeblood. And just like that, they bleed out and pile on top of the others, dying in dust. 

Returning to the earth, just as Adam was raised from it. 

You wish you could dig all of them up with your hands, grasp their souls and drag them back to solid ground with sheer willpower, clutch their faces between your palms and tell them it’s over, and it almost occurs to you to crouch down and start scratching at the ground before you are yanked back to reality. 

Were they all for naught? For the Japs to just surrender? It was that easy. Just issue an announcement. 

Too soon and too rough. 

“What’s after this, huh?”

You don’t answer. Burgie won’t mind. His boots – all you can see of him – retreat a few moments later when your mouth opens in a silent, agonized scream and another sob rips forth. You fold yourself over your rifle where you are sitting on the ground, and you crumple inwards, holding your head between your hands. 

Sledge keeps rubbing you on the back until you relax halfway. And then he sits back, languidly packs the pipe with that routine normalcy, and smokes it. You appreciate the presence. It’s comforting. And he doesn’t ask anything or say anything – he just sits. 

Maybe, you think, as you regard him secretly when he’s looking out over the water, he is considering what he’s going to do when he gets home. 

Maybe, like you, he just doesn’t want to face it. You have no idea. He’s different like everyone else, including you. Two years ago, you might’ve been overcome with joy. 

Now, sudden changes make you grim. No matter if it’s moving out to retake an airfield or a declaration of the surrender of the Empire of Japan. 

–

You are correct. It is not over. In fact, it’s far from over, you realize, standing an entire year later in the back of a transport vehicle as it roars and revs through the Chinese country. You sit back down, jam the rifle between your legs, and try to get some sleep. It doesn’t come, though, no matter how hard you try. 

It’s the trouble with sleep. It doesn’t come when called. Instead, it becomes increasingly evasive. 

Sleep becomes an elusive figure in the night, and a spectre burning off with the morning overcast in the day. You can only get some if your body has to beg for it, and so you work yourself to the bone with pointless tasks while all the other Marines kick back and mess around in the city. 

Sledge looks at you from his seat beside you, and his elbow brushes against your arm every time the truck hits a rut. It’s almost like looking at an entirely different person from the one you met at the beginning of the war. He doesn’t smile now. When he laughs, it’s harsh and sardonic. It’s a little like you, but it was just more dramatic seeing him change. He’d been an optimistic one once. But like everyone else, he’d gotten his insides chewed up and spat out. He was absent at times. 

He is absent now, and it’s not a bad thing, necessarily, to be absent in the peace of Chinese occupation. His eyes are closed and his shirt is flapping in the breeze – instead of being soaked through with sweat and jungle moisture, clinging to his frame. He needs a haircut, you think, as his strands flutter almost delicately off his forehead. 

Absence is comforting. You can feel the world gearing back up again – the world-ending possibility of bombs, the liquidity of the international borders, the cold reaching hands of the hard vengeful nation up north. It’s nice to retreat inwards. Forget your duty as a part of the war machine. You signed up for it, after all. Detachment permits you to momentarily separate from the accumulated, crushing thing that is much more than guilt.

Sledge cracks an eye open, squinting into the bright sun, which is a white-hot disk behind heavy fog. He catches you staring, and raises an eyebrow. You’re comfortable enough with him to just shrug and say nothing more, and he leans back against the bar. His head is bouncing slightly off the metal, and it looks far from comfortable, but at least it’s almost like peace. 

– 

You’ve cleaned your rifle already that day, but your fingers are itching to be occupied again, and you bring out the cleaning supplies and the rifle, nudging snaps apart and prying locks apart. There are worn calluses on the sides of your fingers that have grown there over time. You distantly remember basic training, when you were told your rifle was your life. _It ain’t a gun. It’s a rifle_ , the sergeant had said. _You sleep with it, train with it, fight with it_. 

It has done you well over the three years. You had clutched it to your chest under your soaked poncho, vainly trying to keep it dry as artillery exploded around you in miserable, mud-filled foxholes. You had run with it, crawled through the gritty sand with it under tank fire, scooping dust into the air and down your shirt, leaving a trail of blood that had spattered onto you from someone close by under threat from Jap bunkers waiting up the hill. It had come with you all the way from the motherland and it was with you on the ships, in the waters, on the islands, in the jungles, and now in the east Asian lands. 

China’s foreign, to say the least. Everyone looks different. You are suddenly the _foreigner_ , barraged with foreign sights and sounds and smells whenever you go off-base. You tire of it, eventually, but some of the other men go after the opium, girls, and questionable food. You stay inside, and sometimes – too often – there are empty moments alone in the barracks when you stare out the window, wondering when the pain will bleed away. 

In the battlefield, it’s unsafe to have loud and boisterous nightmares. So no one had them. They were suppressed by pure instinct or something deeper. Ingrained fear, you would like to say, but it’s not like the fear ebbs away when the sound of gunshots recedes. You are still fearful. It’s a different kind of fear. A strange one. It smells of the open air and the crashing sea – the sickening, swelling, desert of a sea – and of the infinite blue sky vaulting into the beyond. Cloudless and suffocating in its volume, grandiose and terrifying in its broad might. 

But the loud nightmares commence, because the vice-grip of fiery fear has faded away. Arguably, this new void-mouth of time’s progression and the future of the unknown is even worse. 

You are back again, standing on the precipice of one of those coral cliffs in Okinawa. The black ones, rough and abrupt; there is nothing and then everything all at once – the shells and the rifle fire and suddenly there are intermittent flashes of light every time they send up another illumination flare, the shadows spreading and turning with each spark of a sensory flood. 

There’s a growing presence in the swimming, churning mixture of hypnotic black and white as darkness folds and bright light ignites and dies in the lifespan of a second or three. Time stutters and flies and then turns around on itself. You are back again. 

You are back again in the fields of heat and rapturous metal and death. And you are crumpled into a ball behind a jut of coral. 

The firefight is deafening, you realize, as you become rooted in the memory. A man from your platoon beside you catches a bullet straight in the helmet, and with a dull metallic ping, he jerks back violently by the neck and then his entire body falls back heavily into the deep, sucking mud with a tremendous splash, without a word or a groan. The only reason you’re sure he’s dead is because of the red spray that almost aerosolizes from the hole in his head as he is hit – a little like a perfume spray, you observe, as you watch him die silently and quickly in the mixture of rainy black silt in a scene that is a dime-a dozen. A few bubbles come up from where his head is submerged, and then nothing. You have more pressing things to be concerned with.

It’s not really clear who the man was, but the replacements cycle so frequently and men are replaced so often that it’s not really a priority to know, and you crunch into a smaller ball around the cold firmness of your rifle – your friend, your wife, your salvation. 

When it’s all over, you have a strange urgency grow in the back of your mind. There are still ricocheting bullets in the distance in another part of the battlefield – there is artillery booming and the sound of rocks hitting the ground, and machine-gun fire. But this small section of the area is clear for at least one or two breaths of air, and the luxury of thought and emotion slams back into your body from where it had dissociated during battle, hovering somewhere out of reach in the sky. It’s a soldier’s best friend and their worst enemy. You become suddenly conscious of the body lying in the caking muck. 

Their head is buried deep in the brackish soup. It feels almost like confirming reality to check the tags, like somehow knowing the identity of whoever used to reside in this body would make their death official. It’s acknowledgement from the living, you think, as you bend down, reaching under the sodden folds of dungarees to fish around for the tags against the body’s cold, foul chest. If acknowledgement of the living is required to release a soul, you think, maybe there is some reason to slink off and die alone like a wolf. 

You catch them between your shaking fingers, and you manage to grip them in your palms, yanking the tags and their chain out from below the dungarees. You blink, trying to force your eyes to readjust to reading the minutiae of the engravings instead of taking in bare images for the purpose of reaction. 

You grip the tags in your hand, pulling harder to bring them into the watery marine-fogged light of dawn, the chain probably cutting into the neck of whoever it was hard enough to cause discomfort if they were still alive. 

You blink several more times. The tag reads _Eugene B. Sledge._

You yank harder on the chain, squinting at the tags in irritation. Of course it wasn’t Sledge. He was one of the eternal living who never seemed liable to death. He wasn’t here at the start of the battle, was he? You didn’t remember him moving to get next to you.

“You’re gonna cut ‘is neck off,” mutters the guy next to you irritatedly, and he smacks your hand to make you let go of the tags. They fall with a jangle, and somehow the light metal tinkle spirals deep into your mind like a key in a lock, and the last dregs of your own self trickle back into place. 

“Sledge?” you whisper, staring at the body. Its face is under the mud, so you fall to your knees and plunge your hands in to the wrists, taking hold of the body’s head and wrenching it out of the heaviness of the mire. 

“Sledge?” you repeat, not comprehending. You forcefully swipe the grime away, like clearing dirt from a watch or blood from your eyes so you can see. 

It’s him, alright, or what used to be him. By now he will be long gone, sailing off to the halls of Valhalla or the gates of hell – wherever they put soldiers, you guess. Wherever they get stored. 

Sometimes you wonder if even God knows what to do with soldiers. You are all walking, talking, battered, miserable, and sinful contradictions. 

If you were God, you’d give Sledge a place within the golden streets, or the pearly gates or whatever he believed in. 

But you are not God, and all you can do is keep wiping water from his face and trembling and staring emptily at his open eyes, where there are bits of soil resting wrongly in them – and why isn’t he clearing them out? Why won’t he blink? 

You are not God as sure as the Japs ain’t human and as sure as Okinawa ain’t home. You’re just a soldier. And you have no control of the fate of the universe, even something so small as one tortured soul and one bullet lodged in a certain, singular brain. It is out of your hands, because you’re a soldier.

–

There is shaking and turmoil, and someone is trying to tear you away from behind. 

_No_ , you scream at no one in particular. There are other incoherent sounds coming from your throat, maybe they are words and you don’t really pay attention to that – but you do claw and scratch and fight your way back to the empty vessel wearing Sledge’s tags. 

“No, no, no!” you shriek. “Come _back_!”

The body lies motionless, the sky is gray, and the rain starts up again. The hands around your waist get stronger, and you are being born away – the coral falls away and you are still clawing for the body because it’s _him_.

You awake fully in a sweating, writhing mess, and the body is there. You scream wildly, pushing him away and kicking at the sheets, and he looks at you with a look that somehow mixes the most extreme inexplicable extent of empathy and helplessness. His eyes are bright and open and very, very blue. 

You are panting and shaking violently and you dart nervous eyes to check your surroundings, making sure you didn’t wake anyone. You are not sleeping below an open sky, and there are actual army cots in the room, and they are all empty. The ceiling is wildly and strangely foreign, even if you’ve been in China for a while now. 

And he is there, very much alive. 

“Sorry,” you choke out uncomprehendingly, wiping an exhausted arm over your damp face. Tears or sweat, you don’t know – maybe a mix. Probably a mix. Sudden shame comes over you as you look at him and realize you probably were bothering whatever attempt he had made at catching some sleep in this typically empty afternoon. 

He shakes his head a few times. 

“Ain’t got nothing to be sorry for,” he says quietly. 

You are still trying to take in the vitality in his face because a moment before you had come to the conclusion that he was dead. 

“I get ‘em too,” he says. 

“I know,” you get out, and then swallow in reflexive regret. “I- I didn’t mean that you bother–”

“It’s okay,” he whispers. “Best of us, you know.”

All you can do is nod a few times. He’s leaning over the sheets, you realize, in a position he hasn’t changed since you awoke and jerked away, and your eyes trace his arms until you see the deep scratches in his forearms. There is a small amount of blood beading up in some of the streaks.

You look down at your own hands. There is a hint of fresh red staining your nails, and your mouth opens in shock and more shame and regret. 

He was trying to wake you up and you had hurt him. You feel his eyes tracing your own hands as he sees you realize what you’ve done. 

“It’s okay,” he says. “Don’t hurt none.”

“I’m sorry,” you say again, because there’s nothing more you can think to say. The shame is beginning to get suffocating, and you can’t look him in the eyes, and you stare at the scratches on his arms, looking like they were put there by an animal instead of a human. You’ve never clawed someone before. You’d always had your M-1 to do the hurting for you.

“I’ve felt worse.”

Something about that statement makes you feel suddenly like crying. Because it’s true. Both of you have weathered the worst of humankind. Whoever had coined the term _battle angels_ didn’t know what they were talking about. You both were floating in a purgatory between learned savagery and a desperate impulse to try and shed the violence. 

You haven’t shed it yet. You probably would never. 

You heave with sobs. He moves his arms around you, and you lose sight of the scratches and are pulled close. 

He is alive, and you are, too. It’s over, you realize, with a heavy weight of realization and grief and a guilty gush of relief. 

It’s over and you and Gene are alive. 

It may never be exactly done for you or for him. But in this moment, you can pretend that someday this hell will fade to a version where you have time occasionally to breathe. 

Moments like this, where the only thing in the world is warmth and proximity. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’d like to comment that in no way does my work ever condone racism nor does it seek to trivialize or normalize the use of ethnic slurs. I myself am a POC, so I consider myself especially conscious of these choices. I also believe in depicting history accurately, however, and even though this is a small barely relevant reader-insert, I will not gloss over a typical American soldier’s impression of people of other ethnicities (which, in the case of WWII, is filtered further by the atrocity of war). It’s a complex topic. I’m open to conversation if you ever would like to discuss this subject :)


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